One of the common ideas that provincial internationalists like to promote to themselves is that the EU enables member-state citizens automatically to live as equal citizens in any other EU country. This must be true, they think, because it is a right enshrined in (more…)

US Presidential hopeful Donald Trump has announced that he would ban Muslims from entering the USA. Now he endangers us all by bringing the outraged voice of his American opposition to Europe.

When you consider that Muslims only comprise 0.6% of the US population it is, perhaps, understandable that Trump’s view is considered, by some of the American public, to be ‘extreme.’ However, in Europe – whose Muslim proportion stands officially at over 6% – we cannot allow the extremity of our own debate to be defined by that of America’s.

A petition has been started in the UK Parliament to prevent Trump from entering the country – and it is hardly surprising that Great Britain (population 5% Muslim), is leading the way.

Lines of identical flags (characteristic of the healthy development of any self-ordained superpower)

Think of the last time you heard someone shut their eyes, open their mouth and declare with a proficient flick of an open palm: ‘you win the argument if you know the facts.‘

My guess is that the person who spoke these wordsfound it necessary to speak them because they were the sort to depend upon an abundance of information to gain-say the other into silence. Nothing wrong with that – but demonstrating a superior grasp of the facts is not ‘winning the argument,’ which is why she (it was a she, wasn’t it?), had to (more…)

Britain’s handling of the Chinese state visit displays a central confusion of intent: can it be right to restrict civil society for the good of a nation?

The mighty Orient

‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer,’ must surely have been the quiet adage behind the treatment of Chairman Xi Jinping in London last week – or so the British Prime Minister would like his citizens to think.

Following the Internationale’s latest blow to the Kraft Durch Freude programme, we must ask ourselves: has an unwieldy socialist dream just come full circle?

Volkswagen have been caught fitting devices to their cars which detect when they are having their emissions tested in a garage. The cars automatically retune their engines to satisfy the legal emissions requirements until they sense they are back on the road, at which point they resume the belching of Cyanide and Prussic Acid that are the natural result of German mechanical excellence. (more…)